I believe I’ve pitted that phrase.
Slinking away in hypocritical shame.
this is so asine. Biden has the choice of following the law and executing the spending that Congress authorized, OR following the law and not spending because of the debt limit.
One is keeping the full faith and credit of the United States intact, the other is acting like a third world despot. Which one is more faithful to the charter?
Biden shouldn’t budge and inch. Do the trillion dollar coin and/or throw this to the Supremes. Otherwise it is simply negotiating with terrorists.
I haven’t been following the topic that closely, so could someone remind me of the important future dates that have the potential to drag the world economy off a cliff?
For light relief: ‘raise the debt ceiling’ is an anagram of ‘reignite shit debacle’, which some may deem appropriate…
There is no future date. We are already off the edge of the borrowing limit. The treasury has already started prioritizing payments. The Treasury says “sometime in June” these payment magicks will be exhausted and the US will default. There’s no set date.
This article from last week says that the Treasury isn’t making any prioritisation plans. There are three issues:
-
Prioritization of payment for certain obligations over others may still be considered default. Certainly, that’s the classic definition of insolvency: “failure to pay one’s obligations as they come due”.
-
Treasury is not even sure it has the technical capacity to choose certain payments over others.
-
President Biden is highly unlikely to accept a solution that means the US is paying the big bondholders and foreign investors in US treasury bonds, while stiffing Grammie who needs her social security payments to buy food and pay rent.
ETA: forgot to say: by what I’ve seen, but can’t track down, is that Yellen & Co. are moving money around to cover existing obligations; if they’ve got more money than they need at the moment in Account A, they can transfer some of the surplus to Account B to cover payments that are coming up in B.
But that’s just moving money around from different funds and bank accounts. It’s not prioritising payments, as I understood it?
I think this is correct – it’s part of the “extraordinary measures” they’re taking to avoid defaulting on any payments. These measures apparently run out of steam sometime in June.
If it’s the case that not all Republican representatives are nihilist loonies, couldn’t some dozen or so of them move right now with the Dems to increase the debt limit with a clean bill?
One of the more “interesting” issues this time around is that it’s not even clear what the ransomers want in order to avoid default.
Some of us have a sneaking suspicion that a default is what they want. There’s very little an outside adversary could do to actually hurt the US in any meaningful way, but this? This could hurt. And there are people we know who have been manipulating US politics and politicians who would just love to hurt the US right now.
That’s so true we should just come out and say it. McCarthy and Co. want to destroy the government and the economy because it would help their Russian masters win in Ukraine. That would lead to clear the path to Trump’s re-ascension in 2024.
Such a plan is insane, but insanity is the only way to approximate what might be going on in their brainal voids.
As others have said, IMO, what they want is to wreck the country. Maybe they see it as a chance to grab power afterwards. Maybe Putin has told them to do it. Maybe they’re just morons. Whatever their motivations, I think they just want to see things burn.
Well, hopefully there are enough non-nihilist non-loonies to come to some sort of agreement.
They only need six non-loonies. But that might be a bit of a stretch.
But to bring it back to the practicalities (the reason I made this post in the first place), does that matter if it can’t make it for a vote to begin with?
It can make it to a vote if enough Republicans vote to bring it to the floor.
The Rules Committee decides what gets onto the floor. The wacko “Freedom Caucus” controls that committee. That was one of the prices McCarthy made the USA pay for his Speakership.
I’m not enough of a House procedural expert to know if there’s a way to bypass the Rules Committee. But if there is, damn good bet it’s real politically expensive to use.
But the House rules package includes an alternative available to the moderates: a majority of the House can bypass the speaker and Rules Committee and bring any bill to the floor using a discharge petition.
From here.
And I’m half-hoping that it does come down to that. We need a wedge to split the crazy wing of the GOP from the slightly less crazy wing. Perhaps the looming threat of a debt default will finally convince a few of the Republicans that their party has gone too far, and they must break with the party if they ever want to fix it.
As with medicine, sometimes you have to amputate a limb to save a life.
Cool. Thanks.
I have a feeling that “emergency bypass” feature will get a quite a workout between now and when the FC loonies push McCarthy out of the Speakership. Which I predict is in about 2 months.
And replace with whom, do you suppose?
Somebody more to the FC’s liking. I don’t follow wack-job politics closely enough to name names. But there’s no shortage of wack-jobs who’d love to sit in the top seat and are willing to nuke the rest of their party and the nation to get it.